10 December 2008

Something Funny

As we are often known to do, we were spending some time in the local library this week. We stumbled on a ridiculous book. It appears to be the work of a conspiracy theory group in the western United States, but it specifically mentions the VOSJ, so we thought we would take a look.

The "book" in question is called Taking Off the Blindfold, by G.C. Hatonn. Essentially, it espouses the theory that the entire world is controlled by a Jewish/Satanist group of which HM Queen Elizabeth II is a part. The following paragraph comes from the section of chapter 1 entitled "Knights of the Order of the Garter:"

The Knights of the Order of the Garter are the leaders of the Committee of 300, Queen Elizabeth II’s most trusted “privy council”. When I did my research on the Order of St. John of Jerusalem some years ago, I went to Oxford to talk with one of the Masters who is a specialist on ancient and modern British traditions. He told me that the Knights of the Garter are the inner sanctum, the elite of the elite of Her Majesty’s Most Venerable Order of St. John of Jerusalem. Let me say this is not the original order founded by the true Christian warrior, Peter Gerard, but is typical of many fine institutions that are taken over and destroyed from the inside, while yet appearing to the uninitiated to be the original.

The next section is entitled "Order of Jerusalem (and a Little Satanism!)" and goes more specifically into the VOSJ. Here, the author states:

I learned from the papers in the museum named after Victoria that she changed the name of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem in 1885 in order to break away from the Catholic connection of the Order’s founder, Peter Gerard, and renamed it the “Protestant Most Venerable Order of Jerusalem.” Membership was open to every oligarchical family that had made its fortune in the China opium trade and every thoroughly decadent family received a place in the ‘new order.’

The next section brings the discussion to Canada discusses "the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem, who control Canadian commerce in all of its facets." Now we had a long discussion about this book amongst ourselves. Some of us wanted to make mention of this odd publication and some of us wanted to leave well enough alone. In the end, we decided that the negative consequence of free press for these conspiracy theorists was less than the positive consequence of sharing what a few nuts in Las Vegas think. If we know what misinformation is out there, we can more easily defend ourselves against it...and it was good for a laugh.